Resolve and determination go a long way in Kaiba's eyes, and no one he meets throughout his life matches up as much as Yugi Mutou. However, that resolve combined with Yami Yugi's willingness to use "crueler" options is what draws Kaiba and fuels a good part of their rivalry (aside from the whole "intellectual equal" thing, you know). Despite the crueler parts, however, Yami sticks by his friends and -- in Kaiba's eyes - is able to turn even the most useless, disadvantageous quality (- aka dependency/vulnerable friendship -) into something powerful.
It's a type of power Yami teaches Kaiba, and there's no real doubt that without Yami, Kaiba wouldn't be able to grow into the better and stronger person that he is.
Moreover! Kaiba doesn't really respect himself. He has too high of standards/ a perfectionism bent for himself for that. He respects Mokuba, and he respects Yugi Mutou, but it's Yami's commitment to his personal causes - his justice, principles, his own strength, his own self-assurance, and ultimately, his friends - that has even this big ol' doof of a dragon-obsessed rich boy bowing his head.
BUT LET'S TALK ABOUT RESPECT IN THE KAIBA FLAVOR quickly because i'm running out of time
respect means that kaiba will listen! it means he'll go out of his way to aid a person, no matter how round-about and tsun he acts about it. respect means he'd cut down anyone who slighted Yami unfairly, lit. the "only I get to bully him!" ideal. it also means he has some exacting standards for Yami to fit into, and if the guy ever became a wibbling woobie, the respect would be lost... but until then (pls don't let it happen), ultimate loyalty. he'd never be able to treat yami as anything less than a person, which given who Kaiba is, is p impressive. (look at how he treats joey, after all.....)
kaiba is a ball of stress every minute of every hour of every day of every day with the sole exception of when dueling or conversing with his brother. he's got a stick up his ass, but a good portion of that comes from the stress he puts on himself all the time: he constantly feels the need to be five steps ahead of everyone else, whether or not he is, with every investment and move needing to contain some motive. small talk is his worst enemy because it means he's stressed /and/ feeling unproductive, which makes him irritated. and look at what he does to relax! duel? where he makes everything high-stakes and is just barely beginning to learn how to "trust" not over-thinking every move?
he has this convo with joey where joey tells him joey duels for fun and kaiba gets SUUUPER pissy because "every victory is vital!!" ... and joey kind of laughs at him like lol ok bro w/e, and that really sums up kaiba's stress. his forever stress.
that said when he does have those moments where he forgets who he is and what he has to do and the future of infinite possibilities, he gets really ....... this is dorky to say but he gets real soft and sort of fluffy, he can be drywall funny and basically that snarky friend who is fine with not moving for a minute or five. these moments are very very rare but idk you can see it when it's just him and mokuba walking around a virtual forest or when they hug and other cute junk like that. he relaxes. it's weird and puppies prob die while he does it.
in conclusion: when stressed, he's hyper productive but hyper irritable and closed-off. and he gets stressed about everything.
it meant the moment he had to accept that he'd gone off the deep end and had almost killed his brother (death-t version). it meant accepting that the six years of his life under gozaburo HAD corrupted him, and for the worse. it meant debunking so many of the rules that had gotten him so far in a twisted messed up Kaiba household - it meant his win over Gozaburo, and Gozaburo's subsequent death, hadn't been enough, and that he'd lost sight of what he had actually been fighting for. it meant being unable to stop himself from fucking off to comaland for 6 months, and waking up to Pegasus having kidnapped his brother, KaibaCorp's shareholders ready to rip the power he HAD won out of his hands, and, eventually, facing Pegasus, seeing his brother as a soulless doll that followed Pegasus's command as a plaything, and then losing
again and again and again
only he didn't die like his stepdad so he didn't get that excuse. losing to yami yugi meant everything he'd thought was right was going to be systemically proven wrong; it marked a total flip in his life (or, as he'd later think, a return to what he had been like before Gozaburo's influence).
though losing itself had been bad, it was really what that moment signified that makes it Kaiba's worst memory. if he hadn't lost to yami yugi, he sometimes bitterly thinks, he'd never have broken down into a coma, Pegasus never would have gotten his brother, KaibaCorp would have been fine
but then he has to admit to himself that if he hadn't lost to yami yugi he would've killed Mokuba and lost himself completely
more than Mokuba (Mokuba's a strength lbr), more than his anger, more than what he thinks is less than perfect
pride blinds him to considering obvious paths (friendship, the goddamn magic in the goddamn magical items) and making his life - and others' - easier. Pride spurs him to summon big scary dragons when he should really think rationally. It's in his anger-- hell hath not the fury of a man scorned, and all that-- and at the root of his stress, it's the block between him and others. He can't ever bow his head, so he can't ever be a master manipulator - he can only be cruel. Pride helps him move forward, but the way he relies on it as a gauge for self-worth makes it equally, terribly damning. If Kaiba lost pride in his work (in his choices, etc), he'd have lost respect for himself, and if he does that, it isn't much of a stretch to think he wouldn't be long for the cemetery.
That pride is arrogance and it's pretty awful. It makes him stupid... despite what shining beacon of happiness Yugi Mutou thinks I'd say it's a bigger weakness than kaiba's hatred.
Aside from Gozaburo's lesson of "losing = death," pride is the biggest thing to rankle under his losses to Yami.
Mokuba would have to die first. This is required. Kaiba cannot imagine a world in which he is not there for Mokuba. But in a paradox, he'd also have to be dead before Mokuba could die, because Mokuba isn't allowed to die. Um. Yeah. It gets messy. That first wish is highly subconscious and he'd deny it until he [ironically] died.
But if he had to die .......
It'd be for Mokuba. It'd have to be.
It'd be in a way that Mokuba didn't know he was dead, which goes against absolutely everything Kaiba otherwise exists for. He's so so loud in life, but I think he'd want to be quiet in death if it were for his little brother. Well, I say "quiet," but ideally he'd take the top 10 people he despised screaming into hell with him; he'd want to destroy an island, or a small nation, he'd want to go down in a blaze of absolute destruction that he knew would pay off in the long run benefit of those he cares about (see: Yugi Mutou -- not Yami bc he respects Yami and Yami can do his own dirty work -- & Mokuba). He's the type of guy who'd smirk while hitting the self-destruct button, hopefully while his enemies ran toward him to stop him, and want no evidence or answer as to his death be possible. GOD YEAH THAT'S SO IMPORTANT he wants his death to be a mystery!! the greatest mystery!!! he'd fantasize about people wondering how he pulled it off centuries after he died....... which I can't brain how he'd do it bc time limits and tired but he would. houdini of deaths. he'd leave a shockwave felt across economies! people would argue if he did the right or wrong thing in philosophy classes! history would never forget!!!
but then he'd remember Mokuba would know he was dead and how much that'd hurt his lil brother and though he'd think "mokuba needs to grow up" he'd also think "it'd kill him" and then he'd go out with nary a whisper, maybe a misleading "I'm going to America" notice
(after poisoning his enemies of course)
(truer facts: he'd never ever ever die of natural causes. sickness and old age cannot choose his death for him. this is also law.)
actually no okay... it used to be awesome when he was a kid, but Gozaburo stamped him into super logic and rational thinking. I think! he still has moments of that breed of creativity, but a lot of it is subconscious-- thus kaibaland, thus bewd jet, etc etc. he rarely daydreams, though, and he finds being intentionally "creative" when it isn't related to how to build or manage a thing super difficult. I imagine he might occasionally try but get really frustrated and turn his attention elsewhere so it doesn't feel like he's giving up though he is... kinda sad tbh.
that said if you find imagination in the art of technology and science, he's got it in spades. SO really, I'd say he was once a hyper imaginative kid, but had it shaped into hard numbers and cold science, so... he's still got it, it just doesn't look right.
if it ever did get away from him (daydreaming/dreams/nightmares/creativity), I think it tends toward violent and cruel-- an inner expression of a whole lot of pent-up anger and hate-, which is part of why he (now) shies away from it. shit in a twisted brain gets scary, yo, and he doesn't ever really WANT to acknowledge just how fucked up Gozaburo made him. so! he puts it into his creations.
(this is also why so much of his motifs are stuck on BEWD... .......... she's his symbol of hope and change, but she's also not so creative)
did they like teachers, classmates, school in general?
he liked the idea of school! intelligence! discussing smart topics! everyone working toward greater goals....
oh wait what's that Gozaburo and an over inflated ego YEAH that makes school pretty 1. stressful and 2. boring when not stressful
SO KAIBA HAS Gozaburo School, which was all the hellish tutoring and late-night studying and surprise extreme tests and basically forever being pushed to a breaking point, which he despised for obvious reasons (and then almost appreciated for a bit bc twisted mindset made him think it helped him but yami broke him of that).
Then there's Normal School, which was full of incompetent, easily manipulated teachers, stupid textbooks way below his level, and classmates who grated on his nerves with their meaningless frivolous goals and dreams and hopes and yeah he might've been occasionally bitter over how easy they had it but they were LESSER and DUMB so WHATEVER
........... he skipped as often as he could and twisted teacher's arms into over looking his absences with great grades and creepy child-working-the-system nonsense. and oh, he always got good grades. but he despised the entire system and structure every step along the way-- I imagine when he did have to go to school he was a pit of stress over the PRODUCTIVE stuff he could be doing, which resulted in him being isolated from the class aside from being known as "that rich intense kid," and teachers didn't like him because he weaseled out of participation/group projects and always subtly insulted them in his papers. as a consequence he didn't go Above and Beyond in Normal School, and Gozaburo School was shit all over sooo.
to what degree have you controlled the path your life has taken?
In Kaiba's opinion? Every step, every day, every hour, he's controlled to the nth degree. His belief in his independence of free will and choice goes to the point that he despises destiny and anything that implies he hadn't controlled. This is part because he's a controlling bastard who hates to think something has boosted him up or held him down; also part because he believes in taking responsibility for actions, and if something else forced his hand... then how could he ever take responsibility?
tbf a lot of things WERE out of his control - his parents' deaths, Gozaburo's death (arguably), Pegasus's choices, those funky Egyptian parallels - but how he responded to these things and what he shaped from them matters to him far more than any idea of destiny ever could
Outside of Kaiba's opinion? ... Things like destiny don't really matter outside of the person who thinks about it, do they?
Ishizu screams in the distance
for once in this game this answer is really small... ilu all thx for sticking wit me
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
SETO KAIBA IS FIRST
who is the person you respect the most and why
Resolve and determination go a long way in Kaiba's eyes, and no one he meets throughout his life matches up as much as Yugi Mutou. However, that resolve combined with Yami Yugi's willingness to use "crueler" options is what draws Kaiba and fuels a good part of their rivalry (aside from the whole "intellectual equal" thing, you know). Despite the crueler parts, however, Yami sticks by his friends and -- in Kaiba's eyes - is able to turn even the most useless, disadvantageous quality (- aka dependency/vulnerable friendship -) into something powerful.
It's a type of power Yami teaches Kaiba, and there's no real doubt that without Yami, Kaiba wouldn't be able to grow into the better and stronger person that he is.
Moreover! Kaiba doesn't really respect himself. He has too high of standards/ a perfectionism bent for himself for that. He respects Mokuba, and he respects Yugi Mutou, but it's Yami's commitment to his personal causes - his justice, principles, his own strength, his own self-assurance, and ultimately, his friends - that has even this big ol' doof of a dragon-obsessed rich boy bowing his head.
BUT LET'S TALK ABOUT RESPECT IN THE KAIBA FLAVOR quickly because i'm running out of time
respect means that kaiba will listen! it means he'll go out of his way to aid a person, no matter how round-about and tsun he acts about it. respect means he'd cut down anyone who slighted Yami unfairly, lit. the "only I get to bully him!" ideal. it also means he has some exacting standards for Yami to fit into, and if the guy ever became a wibbling woobie, the respect would be lost... but until then (pls don't let it happen), ultimate loyalty. he'd never be able to treat yami as anything less than a person, which given who Kaiba is, is p impressive. (look at how he treats joey, after all.....)
how do you deal with stress
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AHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAH
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pretty well, all considered
kaiba is a ball of stress every minute of every hour of every day of every day with the sole exception of when dueling or conversing with his brother. he's got a stick up his ass, but a good portion of that comes from the stress he puts on himself all the time: he constantly feels the need to be five steps ahead of everyone else, whether or not he is, with every investment and move needing to contain some motive. small talk is his worst enemy because it means he's stressed /and/ feeling unproductive, which makes him irritated. and look at what he does to relax! duel? where he makes everything high-stakes and is just barely beginning to learn how to "trust" not over-thinking every move?
he has this convo with joey where joey tells him joey duels for fun and kaiba gets SUUUPER pissy because "every victory is vital!!" ... and joey kind of laughs at him like lol ok bro w/e, and that really sums up kaiba's stress. his forever stress.
that said when he does have those moments where he forgets who he is and what he has to do and the future of infinite possibilities, he gets really ....... this is dorky to say but he gets real soft and sort of fluffy, he can be drywall funny and basically that snarky friend who is fine with not moving for a minute or five. these moments are very very rare but idk you can see it when it's just him and mokuba walking around a virtual forest or when they hug and other cute junk like that. he relaxes. it's weird and puppies prob die while he does it.
in conclusion: when stressed, he's hyper productive but hyper irritable and closed-off. and he gets stressed about everything.
worst memory
it meant the moment he had to accept that he'd gone off the deep end and had almost killed his brother (death-t version). it meant accepting that the six years of his life under gozaburo HAD corrupted him, and for the worse. it meant debunking so many of the rules that had gotten him so far in a twisted messed up Kaiba household - it meant his win over Gozaburo, and Gozaburo's subsequent death, hadn't been enough, and that he'd lost sight of what he had actually been fighting for. it meant being unable to stop himself from fucking off to comaland for 6 months, and waking up to Pegasus having kidnapped his brother, KaibaCorp's shareholders ready to rip the power he HAD won out of his hands, and, eventually, facing Pegasus, seeing his brother as a soulless doll that followed Pegasus's command as a plaything, and then losing
again and again and again
only he didn't die like his stepdad so he didn't get that excuse. losing to yami yugi meant everything he'd thought was right was going to be systemically proven wrong; it marked a total flip in his life (or, as he'd later think, a return to what he had been like before Gozaburo's influence).
though losing itself had been bad, it was really what that moment signified that makes it Kaiba's worst memory. if he hadn't lost to yami yugi, he sometimes bitterly thinks, he'd never have broken down into a coma, Pegasus never would have gotten his brother, KaibaCorp would have been fine
but then he has to admit to himself that if he hadn't lost to yami yugi he would've killed Mokuba and lost himself completely
and admitting that is even worse
biggest weakness
more than Mokuba (Mokuba's a strength lbr), more than his anger, more than what he thinks is less than perfect
pride blinds him to considering obvious paths (friendship, the goddamn magic in the goddamn magical items) and making his life - and others' - easier. Pride spurs him to summon big scary dragons when he should really think rationally. It's in his anger-- hell hath not the fury of a man scorned, and all that-- and at the root of his stress, it's the block between him and others. He can't ever bow his head, so he can't ever be a master manipulator - he can only be cruel. Pride helps him move forward, but the way he relies on it as a gauge for self-worth makes it equally, terribly damning. If Kaiba lost pride in his work (in his choices, etc), he'd have lost respect for himself, and if he does that, it isn't much of a stretch to think he wouldn't be long for the cemetery.
That pride is arrogance and it's pretty awful. It makes him stupid... despite what shining beacon of happiness Yugi Mutou thinks I'd say it's a bigger weakness than kaiba's hatred.
Aside from Gozaburo's lesson of "losing = death," pride is the biggest thing to rankle under his losses to Yami.
if you could choose, how would you die
at the age of thirty
no okay in seriousness.......
Mokuba would have to die first. This is required. Kaiba cannot imagine a world in which he is not there for Mokuba. But in a paradox, he'd also have to be dead before Mokuba could die, because Mokuba isn't allowed to die. Um. Yeah. It gets messy. That first wish is highly subconscious and he'd deny it until he [ironically] died.
But if he had to die .......
It'd be for Mokuba. It'd have to be.
It'd be in a way that Mokuba didn't know he was dead, which goes against absolutely everything Kaiba otherwise exists for. He's so so loud in life, but I think he'd want to be quiet in death if it were for his little brother. Well, I say "quiet," but ideally he'd take the top 10 people he despised screaming into hell with him; he'd want to destroy an island, or a small nation, he'd want to go down in a blaze of absolute destruction that he knew would pay off in the long run benefit of those he cares about (see: Yugi Mutou -- not Yami bc he respects Yami and Yami can do his own dirty work -- & Mokuba). He's the type of guy who'd smirk while hitting the self-destruct button, hopefully while his enemies ran toward him to stop him, and want no evidence or answer as to his death be possible. GOD YEAH THAT'S SO IMPORTANT he wants his death to be a mystery!! the greatest mystery!!! he'd fantasize about people wondering how he pulled it off centuries after he died....... which I can't brain how he'd do it bc time limits and tired but he would. houdini of deaths. he'd leave a shockwave felt across economies! people would argue if he did the right or wrong thing in philosophy classes! history would never forget!!!
but then he'd remember Mokuba would know he was dead and how much that'd hurt his lil brother and though he'd think "mokuba needs to grow up" he'd also think "it'd kill him" and then he'd go out with nary a whisper, maybe a misleading "I'm going to America" notice
(after poisoning his enemies of course)
(truer facts: he'd never ever ever die of natural causes. sickness and old age cannot choose his death for him. this is also law.)
how is character's imagination?
actually no okay... it used to be awesome when he was a kid, but Gozaburo stamped him into super logic and rational thinking. I think! he still has moments of that breed of creativity, but a lot of it is subconscious-- thus kaibaland, thus bewd jet, etc etc. he rarely daydreams, though, and he finds being intentionally "creative" when it isn't related to how to build or manage a thing super difficult. I imagine he might occasionally try but get really frustrated and turn his attention elsewhere so it doesn't feel like he's giving up though he is... kinda sad tbh.
that said if you find imagination in the art of technology and science, he's got it in spades. SO really, I'd say he was once a hyper imaginative kid, but had it shaped into hard numbers and cold science, so... he's still got it, it just doesn't look right.
if it ever did get away from him (daydreaming/dreams/nightmares/creativity), I think it tends toward violent and cruel-- an inner expression of a whole lot of pent-up anger and hate-, which is part of why he (now) shies away from it. shit in a twisted brain gets scary, yo, and he doesn't ever really WANT to acknowledge just how fucked up Gozaburo made him. so! he puts it into his creations.
(this is also why so much of his motifs are stuck on BEWD... .......... she's his symbol of hope and change, but she's also not so creative)
did they like teachers, classmates, school in general?
oh wait what's that Gozaburo and an over inflated ego YEAH that makes school pretty 1. stressful and 2. boring when not stressful
SO KAIBA HAS Gozaburo School, which was all the hellish tutoring and late-night studying and surprise extreme tests and basically forever being pushed to a breaking point, which he despised for obvious reasons (and then almost appreciated for a bit bc twisted mindset made him think it helped him but yami broke him of that).
Then there's Normal School, which was full of incompetent, easily manipulated teachers, stupid textbooks way below his level, and classmates who grated on his nerves with their meaningless frivolous goals and dreams and hopes and yeah he might've been occasionally bitter over how easy they had it but they were LESSER and DUMB so WHATEVER
........... he skipped as often as he could and twisted teacher's arms into over looking his absences with great grades and creepy child-working-the-system nonsense. and oh, he always got good grades. but he despised the entire system and structure every step along the way-- I imagine when he did have to go to school he was a pit of stress over the PRODUCTIVE stuff he could be doing, which resulted in him being isolated from the class aside from being known as "that rich intense kid," and teachers didn't like him because he weaseled out of participation/group projects and always subtly insulted them in his papers. as a consequence he didn't go Above and Beyond in Normal School, and Gozaburo School was shit all over sooo.
to what degree have you controlled the path your life has taken?
tbf a lot of things WERE out of his control - his parents' deaths, Gozaburo's death (arguably), Pegasus's choices, those funky Egyptian parallels - but how he responded to these things and what he shaped from them matters to him far more than any idea of destiny ever could
Outside of Kaiba's opinion? ... Things like destiny don't really matter outside of the person who thinks about it, do they?
Ishizu screams in the distancefor once in this game this answer is really small... ilu all thx for sticking wit me